In Portland author Leni Zumas' America, women's family planning rights are all but relics.

Abortion has been recriminalized nationwide. Canada has established a "Pink Wall" blocking American women from crossing the border to terminate pregnancies or become pregnant using in vitro fertilization. And a new "Every Child Needs Two" law is about to restrict adoption to married couples.

"
Red Clocks
" (Little, Brown and Company, 368 pages, $26) is, of course, fiction, but it has the urgent feel of today's news. "There's not much in 'Red Clocks' that hasn't been suggested by an actual U.S. lawmaker," Zumas said in a recent interview. Her novel, set in a gray Oregon coast town, follows four women all on the verge of becoming undone in some way as their options tick away.

"There's so much ... cultural, familial or actual policy regulation around women's bodies," Zumas said. "That's really what I wanted to explore in this book, and not necessarily reach any resolution or answer about it, but really investigating what does it mean to feel pressure to live your life a certain way or to want a certain thing, and what happens if you don't want it or what happens if getting what you want doesn't make you happy."

Zumas, an associate professor in Portland State University's Creative Writing Program, will launch her book at a reading at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 16, at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St. She'll also appear at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 20, at Broadway Books, 1714 N.E. Broadway. Here are excerpts from a recent interview.

Q:
Tell me where the title comes from.

A:
A "red clock" is a uterus and it's a phrase that just came to me. I was thinking about all the ways in which the uterus is about cycles and timing, but also this now fairly stale, outdated notion of the biological clock. Red is blood but it's also the idea of danger, a warning.

Q:
This book feels super topical, but I imagine that its journey actually started some time ago.

A:
I started writing this book in 2010 and I was not yet living in Portland, I was living in Asheville, North Carolina, at the time. The book was set in a vague location. And then I got the job at Portland State and moved out here and the first time I went to the Oregon Coast I was blown away. So I decided to relocate the book there. It also fit that it's not this sunny, warm, bikini type of beach, it's more of a forbidding place.

Q:
When you said you started writing the book in 2010, I wondered how much revising did you do in the wake of the 2016 election.

A:
I felt so much ambivalence about working on this book because I was still revising it and thinking these things could happen and may happen. It was a really strange revision process. I did feel more of an urgency, I think, in certain details like the Pink Wall or the "Every Child Needs Two" law, getting really particular and specific about the threats of this legislation on people because of the changes in our government.

Q:
How much of this book is personal?

A:
I really struggled with infertility. I have a son who's 5 and I conceived him using IVF. One of the things that brought me into some of the political elements of this book was several years ago when I was doing some research about IVF, reading about it on the New York Times, and I started seeing a lot of really negative blowback in readers' comments about IVF.

When it comes to making decisions about what women's bodies are and are not supposed to do, people get very prescriptive about what should be happening. That was definitely a personal connection I had to the question of legislating around different kinds of fertility treatments, as well as abortion because it's part of the same coin.

Q:
The publisher is pegging the book to Jan. 22 (the 45
th
anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide). What's your take on that?

A:
). I think it's actually a pretty important anniversary to have conversations around. I'm thinking of the tax bill that just passed and the fact that they got pretty close to putting fetal personhood language into the tax bill - that an unborn child, quote unquote, at any stage of in utero development can be the beneficiary of a college savings plan. If that had gone through, that would have actually set the stage to reverse Roe v. Wade.

I have spent my whole life thinking OK, abortion is legal, and now that feels kind of naive to me, that belief, "Oh, that's a law and so that's going to be there for us."

Q:
Are you concerned about the book being pegged as an abortion book when it's so much more?

A:
Yes and no, because the question of a woman's right to choose is one of the core questions or anxieties in this book, but as you say, there's a lot of other things the book is about. In terms of my own process, I definitely did not start out with political themes in mind. What I started out with were characters and particularly the idea of female friendship and all the ways it can be burdened by either envy or competition or difference or just having different experiences and not being able to share them.

Q:
The Mender character was fascinating. How did you research some of her remedies?

A:
I read a lot of botanical books, like books on herbalism, books specifically on wildcrafting in the Pacific Northwest and edible plants in the Pacific Northwest. I have a couple of friends who are herbalists and so I would sometimes say, "How do you use mugwort?" That research was really fun.

Q:
Goofy question of the interview: If your book were an herb, which one would it be?

A:
I think it would be ghost pipe. I really just like the name. But it also is something that you can boil and eat with lemon and salt and it can be very delicious, but also poisonous if eaten in too great a quantity.

Q:
Is there anything in particular that you hope readers take away from this book?

A:
Multiplicity and complexity in human beings and no one being only one thing or only one way, particularly because I think one of the problems in our politics now is there is such a reductive tendency toward "if you're pro-American then you have to be anti-this." So not being reductive but being able to take in contradictory truths at once.